The present invention relates to security.
It is classical to secure interactions between nodes by means of security algorithms. In particular, authentication algorithms allow checking whether a node is really the one it claims to be and encryption algorithms help making a transmitted content unclear for anybody else but the node the content is intended to.
However, the nodes in question can be of very different types, since they can comprise e.g. very basic chip cards, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Chip) tags, simple devices such as mobile phones or PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), more complex devices such as computer devices, servers, gateways, or even whole telecommunication networks.
It is thus clear that all the nodes do not have the same capacities, especially in terms of processing and/or memory storage.
Therefore, a node having insufficient capacities for carrying out some algorithms may fail in securing its interaction with another node, while some other security algorithms would have suited better and while the other node may have had much higher capacities.
This problem is even more sensitive when speaking of mutual security between nodes. Indeed, mutual security generally carries out a same algorithm for both directions in an interaction. However, each one of the nodes may have sufficient capacities for carrying out security in one direction (e.g. to get authenticated with the other node or to perform encryption), but insufficient capacities for carrying out security in the other direction (e.g. to authenticate the other node or to perform decryption).
An object of the present invention is to alleviate the above mentioned drawbacks.